Portable telephones are currently equipped with functionality that has recently only been available on desktop computing devices. This functionality includes web browsing, video capture, content upload, word processing, etc. Moreover, these portable telephones are becoming less and less expensive, thereby allowing a continuously large number of users to acquire telephones that are capable of performing the aforementioned functionalities.
Accordingly, a user with a smartphone can utilize such phone to browse web sites wherever they are, just as they would from a conventional personal computer. In contrast to a personal computer, however, a user will typically carry her smartphone with her most of the time. This has led to a new class of applications that allow a user to push content over the Internet from the convenience of a smartphone. For example, a user may capture video through utilization of the smartphone and can cause such video to be uploaded to a video sharing web site. In another example, the user may update a status message and cause such status message to be posted to a social networking web site.
Generally, however, pushing rich content such as video streams or large pictures over a cellular (e.g., 3G or 4G) data connection to a web-based server is data intensive, relatively slow compared to broadband connections, and, depending on a data plan corresponding to the telephone, can be expensive.
Currently, for a user of a first portable telephone to provide relatively rich content to a user of a second portable telephone, the following occurs: the user, by way of a cellular network data connection, causes the rich content to be uploaded to a web-based server. Thereafter, the user of the first portable telephone informs a user of the second portable telephone that content can be accessed by way of the web-based service (e.g., via telephone call, text message, or some automatic notification service). The user of the second portable telephone can utilize the second portable telephone to access such web-based service, and can download the rich content, again by way of the cellular network data connection. Alternatively, the user of the first portable telephone can first transfer such rich content to a personal computing device with a broadband connection, and can thereafter cause such content to be uploaded to the web-based service. The user of the first portable telephone can inform the user of the second portable telephone of the availability of the content by way of the web-based service, and the user of the second portable telephone can access such data through utilization of the second portable telephone or a personal computing device. However, this does not enable immediate sharing of relatively data-intensive content. Accordingly, it can be ascertained that several deficiencies exist with respect to sharing relatively rich content between users of portable telephones.